Metacognition for spelling in higher education students with dyslexia: is there evidence for the dual burden hypothesis?

We examined whether academic and professional bachelor students with dyslexia are able to compensate for their spelling deficits with metacognitive experience. Previous research suggested that students with dyslexia may suffer from a dual burden. Not only do they perform worse on spelling but in addition they are not as fully aware of their difficulties as their peers without dyslexia. According to some authors, this is the result of a worse feeling of confidence, which can be considered as a form of metacognition (metacognitive experience). We tried to isolate this metacognitive experience by asking 100 students with dyslexia and 100 matched control students to rate their feeling of confidence in a word spelling task and a proofreading task. Next, we used Signal Detection Analysis to disentangle the effects of proficiency and criterion setting. We found that students with dyslexia showed lower proficiencies but not suboptimal response biases. They were as good at deciding when they could be confident or not as their peers without dyslexia. They just had more cases in which their spelling was wrong. We conclude that the feeling of confidence in our students with dyslexia is as good as in their peers without dyslexia. These findings go against the Dual Burden theory (Krüger & Dunning, 1999), which assumes that people with a skills problem suffer twice as a result of insufficiently developed metacognitive competence. As a result, there is no gain to be expected from extra training of this metacognitive experience in higher education students with dyslexia.